The U.S. dollar, backed by nothing but faith and confidence in the future of America and Americans, is shaky here and abroad
Many are losing confidence as U.S. government spending — in a trend started by President Bush — is worsening exponentially under the Obama administration.

As the government printing presses roll out paper dollars 24/7 and U.S. spending spins out of control, world leaders increasingly are discussing the need to replace the U.S. dollar with something steadier as the planet’s predominant reserve currency.

To fix this problem, we recommend that the U.S. make the savvy move of returning to the gold standard, or to a gold and silver standard, or to some commodities standard that would assure the greenback’s value.

The gold standard is a system in which a common medium of exchange of paper notes are freely convertible into preset, fixed quantities of gold some other valuable commodity.

The gold standard is not now used by any government. It has been replaced by fiat currency — a monetary system in which currency and coins are legal tender and have certain values only because a government says so.

In 1971, the U.S. completely dropped the gold standard under President Nixon, who found that the standard makes waging foreign wars a costraint on federal expenditures, such as the Vietnam War. A return to the gold standard almost certainly would make the war in Afghanistan too costly to sustain.

Under a fiat monetary system, there is no restraint on the amount of money that can be created, thereby allowing unlimited credit creation and endless foreign wars.

When a government is unable to repay its excessive debt in gold or silver, the temptation to remove physical backing rather than to default becomes irresistible.

Under hyper-inflation, which is the terminal stage of any fiat currency, money loses most of its value practically overnight. Hyper-inflation is often the result of increasing regular inflation to the point where all confidence in money is lost.